00:00:26.860And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:30.000So, Adrian, today we have another installment in our ongoing series about a little genre that we like to call the cinema of cancellation.
00:00:40.540Yes, and if this is the first you're hearing of it, it's because a lot of it has happened behind a paywall.
00:00:44.400A lot of this has been us letting our proverbial freak flag fly on Patreon.
00:00:49.800So this is a genre that we've gotten interested in, that we've been sort of tracing.
00:00:53.580But maybe first we should be precise about what we mean by the cinema of cancellation, which is this mini genre and or set of tropes that can come up in other contexts. Some of these are comedies, some of these are dramas, some of these are biopics, etc, etc.
00:01:09.100But I think the way I would describe it is cinema of cancellation tends to center a single genius, single creator, single director stand-in, whoever could plausibly stand-in for a director, and their misadventures with modern media, social morals, and moral reckonings of all kinds.
00:01:27.880These films overwhelmingly take place on campuses, not exclusively, right? There's some notable outliers to the genre like tar, which doesn't have anything to do with a campus really. But they tend to be focused on campus politics, which is part of why we're interested in them. But also they tend to focus on like elite institutions, right? These are films that are self-consciously about a small group of rarefied people.
00:01:52.960And they usually center a famous person of some kind or an important person of some kind, a big professor, a actor, or in the case of Tar, a conductor, who has a certain amount of status that we know sort of from minute one, they're going to lose, or at least it's going to be seriously imperiled in the course of the movie.
00:02:13.280And the film usually stipulates that this is a person that has something coming, right?
00:02:21.120But centrally, what they have coming is never what the movie actually doles out.
00:02:25.160There's always this idea, well, the consequences that this person had coming are far exceeded by what actually happens in the movie.
00:02:31.100Right. They're a flawed character who is meant to evoke like frustration or sort of like tisking from the audience, but then who is revealed to be the real victim when the villains emerge as this like sort of overzealous social justice movements.
00:02:48.380And I would say that what really characterizes cinema of cancellation, even though these all work in different genres and sort of tell quite different stories, you know, some of them are brisk comedies.
00:03:00.100Some of them are like three and a half hour long movies with lots to say.
00:03:04.720But what really characterizes these is where they apportion their interest, their sympathy and their attention.
00:03:10.420There are certain things where these movies tend to be interested in a whole lot of nuance than their other, whereas a caricature will do just fine.
00:03:16.960And it's always very telling where that is.
00:05:30.920which is the cinema of cancellation is having a moment and nobody's here for it.
00:05:35.060Yeah, I think that when the cinema of cancellation was at its peak, at least in recent years, was around 2020, right?
00:05:44.260Sort of like the crust of the wave of Woke One, where projects that had been greenlit in sort of the initial flurry of the Me Too movement got their release.
00:05:54.480And the success of something like TAR owed in part to like a cultural appetite for like elite intellectual style anti-wokeness and a sort of rejection of what was seen to be like feminism, sexual, like puritanical strain at the time.
00:06:12.840and now a bunch of other projects that I think got greenlit around the time that that big
00:06:19.460commercial success and critical success happened are coming out at a time when the cultural vibe
00:06:26.580is different right the forces of conservatism and particularly of anti-feminism are now like quite
00:06:33.360firmly ensconced in power uh nobody thinks nobody realistic thinks that feminists are out to get0.92
00:06:40.320them. You know, it's just not a fear that can garner a ton of response or like get a ton of1.00
00:06:47.860investment from audiences when feminism has been so conspicuously defeated. Right. So I think there's1.00
00:06:54.400a weird disjoint in these pieces that are coming out now, these cinema of cancellation artifacts,
00:07:00.600where the politics of the moment that they're trying to lampoon or critique are actually kind
00:18:08.540But, right, this is a show that stars, again, John C. McGinley as the college president, Alan Ruck, Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off himself as a dean.
00:18:18.800I mean, a lot of people in it just are, Jen, X, but then all these people who are sort of associated with the 80s.
00:18:25.560So there's just a very strong 80s vibe to this whole thing, even though it's clearly said in the here and now, right?
00:18:30.020Like just in terms of its cultural references.0.75
00:18:31.600So I do think it's like very much made for and to reflect Gen X kind of alienation from younger generations above all Gen Z.0.69
00:18:41.860You think it's meant to evoke kind of deliberately the sort of changes between their own youth and the sort of fallen, scolding, unfun youth of today?0.70
00:19:02.540But I also think that this kind of niceness that Bill Lawrence's shows tend to have, Bill Lawrence is the creator of Rooster, creates something here akin to what Marcuse calls repressive tolerance, right?
00:19:12.320Like everyone is treated with such humanity that in some way, like, you can't be mad at Steve Carell for grabbing the breasts, right?
00:19:22.400because, like, you're not mad at anyone who's on screen.
00:19:24.880And he's like, well, this man, the reason he's here
00:19:27.760is because he doesn't respect boundaries.
00:19:29.700He doesn't respect his daughter's boundaries.
00:19:31.260He doesn't respect any of his students' boundaries.
00:19:33.340He keeps ambling into these, like, misunderstandings
00:21:37.840You're supposed to be like this poor guy, but you're also supposed to be like, when's he going to get it together, you know?
00:21:41.660Yeah, I think that makes it actually a kind of perfect exemplar of the cinema of cancellation, because of course, what is the buildings from one, if not a place where one person does all the growing and everyone else gets to help them do it. And every cancellation story about a campus is about a highly subjectivized, empathized with academic and or student. And all the other people around him are just basically walk on cameos or worse, they're just scenery.
00:22:10.620And I think that in that way, where this show invests its interest in people's growth, right, as you say, in the man going on 60, its sympathy is one thing.
00:22:22.200As I say, it treats all characters quite sympathetically, including ones that are quite clearly supposed to be kind of woke schools, right down to that disciplinary committee that seems fairly bored with its own job.
00:22:33.460But I don't know if they're interesting.
00:22:35.880There's a lot of sympathy extended to them, but there's not a ton of interest extended towards them.
00:22:40.320Yeah. So, yeah, I likewise would think that this is a show that's totally worth checking out. It's totally fine.
00:22:45.840It's totally fine. It's not interesting. It's not especially accomplished.
00:22:51.060It's great for when you're really exhausted and you can't handle being asked to think too hard. Right.
00:22:57.240Which is what honestly it's what I want from television.
00:22:59.480I'm friends with a professional television critic named Ingu Kang. Shout out Ingu.
00:23:03.800And she's always telling me to watch Industry. And I'm like, why?
00:23:07.400And she's like, well, it's about sexual violence and complicity in it.
00:23:12.120And I was like, well, I will simply not be watching that ever.1.00
00:23:14.780Not with a gun to my head, you know, like I do that shit for my job.0.99
00:23:19.000But when I come home, I want to be lulled.0.99
00:23:22.340I want to be given the televised equivalent of a Xanax.
00:23:26.380And that's exactly what The Rooster offers.
00:23:41.680It's an interesting comparison, right?
00:23:42.720Like, Steve Carell has had an interesting kind of career as, like, someone who, I hope I'm not going to eat my own words here, but, like, appears to just be a genuinely nice guy.0.96
00:23:51.400But he always plays a benevolent dumbass.
00:24:26.320It's not good, but he, I mean, I didn't finish it because it's so boring,
00:24:30.860But he's a cancellation victim who, the show seems to say, deserved it.
00:24:36.080And I also think that, so there is the Michael Scott kind of reading of like, oh, he's so much nicer than the British version, David Brent.
00:24:43.760But I actually don't think that's true.0.67
00:24:45.480I actually think that Michael Scott is the most horrifying of American bosses, which is a scary, narcissistic psycho who also makes you feel sorry for him so you can't even hate him.
00:24:59.080I mean, I love that show, but I think there's a kind of demonic quality that people sort of didn't pick up on as much.
00:25:07.080No, I think this is like a very common like pop feminist heterosexual complaints, like the husband as the king baby who is both all powerful and whose whims must be catered to and whose prerogatives extend as far as possible and also who can never be held responsible.0.88
00:25:23.980Right. That's also the Donald Trump model.0.94
00:25:26.240You know, all the privileges and none of the accountability is kind of a kind of standard guy.
00:25:31.860I don't know. I actually think we see those everywhere in the U.S.
00:25:35.000Yeah, but I mean, in some way, I think Carell is dialing it down this time around.
00:25:39.360I think that in Rooster, he's presented as far more likable than even though Michael Scott.
00:25:43.380Right. Well, part of his arc through the show is that he becomes self-aware, right?
00:25:49.540It's interesting that, like, for somebody who writes these, like, thriller plots in which people, like, supposedly have motives that can't be trusted, right, he gets screwed over quite easily and is a little too trusting of others.
00:26:04.100And then he has to sort of become mature and he has to sort of shed that, which is something that, like, the Michael Scott character never really had to do because that show went on for 100,000 years.
00:29:09.320Also known as the alternate name for Steve Carell's novel hero in Rooster, probably.
00:29:15.660But yeah, so he's this guy who's been out of the public eye for a certain number of years and who's hiding some secrets.
00:29:23.240As the movie goes on, we learn that those secrets are a pretty serious heroin addiction and that he didn't treat his friends particularly well while in the throes of it.
00:29:32.600Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer play his high school friends who sort of manage his image and have kept the wraps on his burnout and addiction, et cetera, et cetera, for quite some time.
00:29:43.840And at the same time, we learn pretty early on that Hawk is completely obsessed with what people are saying about him.
00:29:51.200He's constantly going online, even though all he does is Google himself and find the same articles.
00:29:56.340And it's like, I guess he was born in 1964, so that's possible.
00:30:00.980Although I think the character's supposed to be
00:32:01.480And it becomes a movie about a self-absorbed guy who is all about himself learning to live again.
00:32:08.520But like very many of these movies, it has very little patience for the social forces that are actually shaking Reeves out of his narcissism, right?
00:32:15.720Like we get the internet, which, quote, has changed everything.
00:32:19.720Like this man is supposed to have been out of the public eye for five years.
00:32:25.380There was internet five years ago. I hate to break it to you. Like, there was social media
00:32:28.920five years ago. 30 years ago. Like, how old is this guy supposed to be? When is this supposed
00:32:33.780to be taking place? Right? Like, the internet has changed everything. Go fuck off. And then
00:32:38.220they're like, oh, and like, it's all about gossip now. I'm like, right, Marilyn Monroe would like
00:32:42.280a word, right? Yeah. I think the sense of the newness and the novelty of like, public consequence,
00:32:50.300You know, I do think like the character of this or the scale of this has changed with the advent of like social media. Right. But a lot of this moral panic about cancel culture relies on the sense that it's a new phenomenon.
00:33:03.980And it's just like, I'm sorry, like people have been talking about each other in not very flattering ways for a really long time.
00:33:13.700I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. Like reputations have been maligned. Embarrassment has been experienced. Behaviors have been scrutinized like none of this is especially new and nor is it especially new that it is concentrated more intensely on the powerful or the wealthy.
00:33:33.320Like, none of that is this, like, brand new phenomenon that no powerful or famous person has ever had to deal with before.
00:33:40.420Yeah, especially because the Keanu Reeves character then goes on a quest to sort of figure out whom he has wronged.
00:33:46.160And it's very clear that, like, the movie is deliberately muddling a couple of registers here.
00:33:51.320There are people that he genuinely seems to feel remorse over.
00:33:54.140His old agent, played by Martin Scorsese, his mom, played by Susan Lucci, his first girlfriend, etc., etc.0.99
00:34:00.780So there he thinks, like, oh, I just, I was a jerk.0.58
00:34:03.320right i didn't end it right i switched away from my agent the moment i got too famous for him for0.89
00:34:08.680instance right then there is like this kind of intimation that what he's really afraid will get
00:34:13.340out is that he's not as nice as he seems and then the jonah hill character and the gaggle of like
00:34:19.780advisors he eventually ends up assembling in a greek chorus that is just shatteringly unfunny
00:34:26.480basically like they go through the traditional cancellation stuff like did you say the n-word
00:34:57.600And I was like, Jesus Christ, I'm on minute 55.
00:35:01.680So there is this weird thing where, like, the movie sort of can't keep straight what he's actually afraid of.
00:35:07.220And, like, the fact that some of this, right, like, concerns about having said the N-word or having participated in a racist movie once upon a time, right?
00:35:14.420Like, okay, that can feel a little bit 2020s.
00:35:17.180But then he's like, oh, people might think that I'm not a nice person.
00:35:19.920I was like, that's literally been every gossip rag since, you know, the golden age of Hollywood, basically.
00:35:25.560Yeah. I mean, I think like when you're experiencing cancellation to the canceled, it does feel like a, like a formal moral verdict on your character and on your worthiness. Right. Like I have, I'm sorry, I have not on anything like the scale that Reed Hawk, I imagine would experience, but like, I have been like subjected to like outrage online pylons from people I would have thought of as being on my side. Right. It really is not fun.
00:35:53.340I understand like the mechanism by which it drives people insane. And part of that mechanism is, is like, okay, everybody I would want to recognize me as one of them has sort of like turned on me in this way. And it does feel sort of like unaccountable, right? Or it feels like, oh, the possibility to be understood or like even give it a hearing or allowed to be like considered for understanding is like foreclosed, right?
00:36:19.280on the other hand it goes away in like 10 minutes if you don't engage with it and once you've sort
00:36:28.440of allowed and accepted the reality that not everybody's going to like you some people are
00:36:34.700going to dislike you some people are going to dislike you for reasons that are fair and some
00:36:38.780people are going to dislike you for reasons that are in fact sort of unfair and that's really not
00:36:42.860like in your control to limit or prevent then you're free you just have to like kind of be okay
00:36:52.260with some people disliking you to exist as an adult in the world and you just have to accept
00:36:58.880the reality that you're a flawed infallible human being and that and that you're not going to be for
00:37:04.280everybody and i just don't understand how people are functioning or having any kind of social
00:37:11.060life as adults if they haven't gotten over that except that some people aren't going to like you
00:37:17.560dear listener uh and then you can start living your whole life yeah and i think if we want to
00:37:22.040be as generous as possible to this movie i think that keanu reeves is supposed to learn that lesson
00:37:26.820there's that he's supposed to be someone who can't accept that there will be people who don't like
00:37:30.420him at the same time it's so noticeable that the rest of the cast kind of pretends that something
00:37:35.620very different is happening right like i said most of what he's hiding is a drug addiction and kind
00:37:59.200A much more interesting movie is contained just in that one joke.
00:38:01.780But in the end, like everyone around him seems to sort of be like, oh, what did you do?
00:38:05.580Like, and it's very, like, they don't ever say the word rape, but, like, very clearly they think that he's been sexually transgressive.0.70
00:38:12.680The tape, just to spoil that for people, because please don't watch this movie, is him having cyber sex with some woman.0.81
00:42:06.540The scene plays out in Jonah Hill's office, which in a visual gag that is so cringe and eye roll inducing, only has portraits of super canceled people on the walls.
00:42:20.140Like he walks by a Kevin Spacey picture and this whole conversation is happening under a giant portrait of Kanye West.
00:42:27.740The whole thing is supposed to be this kind of heightened comedy of, you know, a modern tribunal, a modern inquisition, where these people sort of come up with things that Kenry's might have done wrong.
00:42:38.560And he's just constantly like, I didn't say the N-word.
00:42:42.880No, I didn't meet to anyone, et cetera, et cetera, right?
00:42:45.260And it's just really weird and, above all, cartoonish compared to these older actors who get to play, I mean, still not interesting characters, but clearly more fleshed out characters.
00:42:55.820They're not just screeching, howling harpies, basically.
00:42:59.380And I think it's so fascinating, like, just to give you a sense of how out of time and out of place this movie is.
00:43:05.880At the end of the scene that we just listened to, there is the thing where, like, they realized they didn't get the Jewish guy they were trying to get for this panel.
00:43:13.520And then someone says, well, it turns out that hating Jews doesn't negatively affect a person's career.
00:43:20.400Clearly a jab at pro-Palestinian protests the last two years.
00:43:24.340I would imagine. But more to the point, again, the entire meeting is being held under a portrait of Kanye West, who, in fact, the week that I'm not going to defend that guy, but the week that movie came out was denied entry to the UK because of anti-Semitism. Again, I think that's a perfectly fine thing to do.
00:43:44.700But I mean, also anti-Semitism has become like the pretext under which a ton of not anti-Semitic speech and inquiry is silenced, right?0.51
00:44:00.560It's like, frankly, this kind of joke would have been already kind of tired in like 2019.
00:44:07.200I, as the butt of many of those jokes, was tired of them by then.
00:44:12.140But like it would have made more sense, right?
00:44:14.340It would have been in tune with a zeitgeist.
00:44:16.700And the thing is, the anti-cancel culture people, the anti-woke forces among the elites, among the media, among politics, they got everything they wanted.
00:44:26.580All of those guys who were revealed to be sexual abusers in 2017 and 2018, they're fine.
00:44:33.100They're back exactly where they were or someplace better, right?
00:44:35.740All of those women, ask them how they're doing.
00:44:38.360You don't know because you haven't heard from them since, you know?
00:44:41.120like all of these people who were canceled for other reasons have sort of like moved on and
00:44:47.060reintegrated that DEI has been banned by force of law and by AI algorithm right all of the woke
00:44:58.180professors are out of jobs all of the students got beat up by cops at their Gaza encampments you0.96
00:45:05.580know it's like what more do you people fucking want you won you won and you're still complaining
00:45:09.600Yeah, I mean, like, just to give you a sense of how invisible the accuser is in this movie is literally they're making them up, right? They're like, what could this person want? It turns out it's the boyfriend of the woman who had cyber sex with Keanu Reeves. But like the movie treats it as a non point because it's not really a point. The point is the accuser doesn't even really exist. The accuser is entirely an epiphenomenon of wokeness run amok.0.86
00:45:37.380And I really, I want to pause on that question about what more do these people want?
00:45:42.460There is a scene right after these actors, Roy Wood Jr., Atsuko Okatsuka, and Laverne Cox, give us this kind of mock tribunal of Keanu Reeves, where he's always like, no, I didn't do that.
00:45:54.020Right after that, Laverne Cox sort of explains what victim capitalism is, where she says, the only way you can hope to be rich and famous in this culture is to be a victim, right?
00:46:07.480To quote Harry S. Truman, that ain't what I heard.0.99
00:46:10.160But then the other thing is, it really, you're like, you're making a trans actress say that in 2026.0.88
00:46:17.620This feels like somewhere between, like, sorry, but like a minstrel show and just kind of a humiliation ritual.0.75
00:46:25.300You're making these people perform a degraded version of speaking truth to power, like as a joke, in a movie by a white director, you're centering these people only to make fun of them briefly.
00:46:42.360The complete parody, someone like Roy Wood Jr., who again, like hosts The Daily Show and like has very, very astute observations about politics, knows this too.
00:46:50.920It really feels like this is a hazing of these people.
00:46:54.160It's not just like a misreading of what the anti-woke backlash looks like.
00:48:13.140And it seemed like, especially if you were in a liberal milieu, it seems like you could roll your eyes at members of your own in-group
00:48:21.680And they're like sort of like narcissism or excesses or what have you, like not everything done under the banner of woke one is something I found particularly reasonable at the time, you know.
00:48:32.360There were moments when I was like, okay, I think you're doing this a little opportunistically or a little cynically or like you're just kind of overwrought about something that doesn't matter or you're trying to retrofit a social justice vocabulary onto a grievance that doesn't really fit it because you're like making a bid for legitimacy, right?
00:48:52.300In that sense, I can like sort of empathize with the basic anti-woke sentiment, even though I think a lot of it was also motivated by just, you know, like status anxiety, right?
00:49:02.360But like, I think that kind of superficial sympathy with critiques of the excesses of woke one was held a lot more widely than the sense like, no, it is core to American liberty that professors get to call their undergraduate sweet cheeks.
00:49:20.400You know what I mean? Like the kind of like actual righteous outrage that you find from canceled men and their allies is, I think, really like an elite project.
00:49:27.940I think a lot of people are just like, I don't know, this doesn't really matter that much.0.99
00:49:30.340It's annoying and I don't really give a shit.0.97
00:49:32.740And now it's not annoying them anymore because it's all over.0.98
00:50:03.540You know, there's a scene where Abby Jacobson says to Ilana Glazer, you know, I think you're so anti-racist that you're racist again.0.99
00:50:11.080You're all the way back to racist again.
00:50:12.840There are funny bits in that, like just about exactly this, where like, you know, the way sort of Twitter language tends to dial it up to 11 immediately, right?
00:50:20.700Like the way people can sort of take sex positivity in a certain direction, et cetera.
00:50:25.680Like, all this Broad City played within 2016-17 already.
00:50:58.300It's like that episode in Seinfeld where George thinks of the perfect comeback, like, but way too late.
00:51:03.860And then he just kind of storms in, like, at the end of the episode.
00:51:07.900Okay, who among us has not had that experience where you, like, your eyes burst open in the middle of the night and you're like, oh, my God, this is what I should have said.
00:51:17.780But then the other thing, of course, is that like anti-wokeness was a way for everyday consumers to stand sort of shoulder to shoulder with the elites to be like, yeah, it has gone too far.
00:51:28.480I mean, he's experiencing it, but I might also experience it.
00:51:31.660Yes, I am right now a working Joe or a wage slave.0.95
00:51:36.240But one day I will fulfill my true destiny as a sex pest professor.0.89
00:51:41.700Right. And every working Joe consumer of media was a temporarily embarrassed sex pest professor.0.98
00:51:48.500Yeah. Or the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.0.87
00:51:52.860Yeah. But like, I think that the reassertion of elite dominance in Trump 2.0 very much puts a lie to that.
00:52:00.600Like you stood shoulder to shoulder with someone and that person you stood shoulder to shoulder with was like, and I also liked Epstein's Island.
00:52:05.940You're like, what? I didn't think that's what I was doing. Right.
00:52:09.460I think both Rooster, but certainly Outcome, shows just like how much of this is just an elite complaint.
00:52:17.140I read like Reddit threads about this movie where people are just like, this feels like it was made by space aliens.
00:53:04.660I'm going to go like into battle for Lena Dunham.
00:53:07.580I'm going to be full cringe millennial white feminist in a terrible way that would have, coincidentally, gotten me canceled a few years ago.
00:53:16.060And this year I will be using all of my post-woke liberty to defend Lena.
00:53:21.340And then you can you can be the critical reader.
00:53:23.840Yeah. No one's allowed to say how much I like Lena Dunham.
00:53:28.420I'm being silenced for my love of girls.